I won the lottery!

As some or many of you know there are scams out there claiming you have won a lottery and need to contact Person X in Country Y to recieve your prize money. But you have to supply them with all sorts of personal identification information before they give you the money. This information is then used and sold to other people who steal  your identity.

Working in the financial industry as I do, I see this quite a bit. People coming in and saying “I won the United Kingdom’s Lottery! I just have to tell them my account number, routing number, credit card number, social security number, and address! They’re going to send me millions of dollars!”

The first question you should be asking yourself is: do you remember purchasing a lottery ticket? No? How could you win a lottery that you never knew existed and you didn’t buy a ticket for?

Question 2: Does this country even *have* a lottery? Very few, if any, countries have a national lottery full of cash prizes. If they do, you probably need to buy a ticket (see question 1).

I’m always shocked that people fall for this and I’m sure you are wondering why I let you kind folks of the FFXI community know about this. The reason is simple: they try it in FFXI too.

To help you out, I’m going to include a copy of the email I recieved today (hyperlinks have been disabled in the email, just to be sure).

———————————————————————————————————————————————-

UK ONLINE PROMO INC.
e-lottery (REF NO.UK/xxxxxxXx/xx)

We are pleased to inform you of the July 2009 UK e-LOTTERY draw.
Your email address was randomly picked on the internet. These details; BATCH NUMBER:xxx/xxx/XYxx;
TICKET NUMBER: xxx-xxxx-xxx-xxx attached to your email consequently won you the sum of ￡552,000.00 in the 2nd category.
You are herein to contact our underlisted claims agent with the above details
for collection

Name: Dr. Laurence Cole
eMail:claims-uknl@live.com
Tel:  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Congratulations!!
Sir. Richard llordys (Online Coordinator)

———————————————————————————————————————————————-

Be careful with your personal identification information and your identity and account information will be that much more safe and secure.

I gives you cookies, is that not good enough?

Today begins much like many of my days in Vana’diel as of late: learning Blue Mage spells.  Normally not fun for anyone, but I tend to enjoy it because it pays out in the end… especially that shiny new Frenetic Rip that I got today.

Little did I know that something new was going to happen today…

Black Mage burn parties on Beastmen BST pets is something that, well, I’ve never seen before. Mostly because I’ve never leveled BLM past 43 and never leveled any mage job other than SMN. So you can understand my surprise when I’m standing in Whitegate on my BLU63 looking for a party when I was invited to one. They explained to me that they wanted to fight Gigas’ Tigers in Vunkerl Inlet [S] and needed someone to synch to of the appropriate level. They even said I could go AFK for 3 hours and it would be okay. That they would be plenty able to kill the tigers without my help, I’m just there as a level synch whore (my phrase, not theirs lol).

I decided to take them up on the offer of joining the party, though I wasn’t going to go AFK for 3 hours. Don’t know about you, but I don’t like being AFK with strange people in dangerous places for extended periods of time…

So I stand there… cast Protectra II every now and again… watch some Burn Notice, Warehouse 13 and curse that there are no new episodes of Eureka on Hulu… and about 4 hours of me not doing anything I get hit with this beauty:

“You know, when you leech exp like this off of a BLM it costs a gil an exp point per BLM. So you owe us at least 30k each! Spells are expensive.”

Now, I have no problems paying people for hard work that they have done for me. My problem lies in that it took them 4 hours to tell me this rather than telling me this up front. Granted, they cannot do anything about the exp I have already earned and the worst thing they can do is kick me from the party.

I’m doing them a service. I am making it so that they can still earn big exp while putting forth very little effort. Hell, I even got them each a stack of Wizard cookies to begin with because I felt bad!

If you want me to pay for the work you do for me, let me know in advance. That way I know whether or not I should look elsewhere for help. And remember: you asked *me* to help *you*, I didn’t come to you asking for a different kind of power level.

[/rant]